When I was a boy the Candleton sisters, seven of them, lived in a large gabled house built of red brick that gave the impression of having been muted by continual sunlight to a pleasant shade of orange-rose. The front face of it had a high, benign open appearance and I always felt that the big sash windows actually smiled down on the long gravel terrace, the iron pergola of roses and the sunken tennis lawn. At the back were rows of stables, all in the same faded and agreeable shade of brick, with lofts above them that were full of insecure and ancient bedsteads, fire-guards, hip-baths, tennis rackets, croquet hammers, rocking horses, muscle-developers, Indian clubs, travelling trunks and things of that sort thrown out by Mr and Mrs Candleton over the course of their fruitful years.
I was never very sure of what Mr Candleton did in life; I was not even sure in fact if he did anything at all except to induce Mrs Candleton, at very regular intervals, to bear another daughter. In a town like Evensford there were at that time very few people of independent means who lived in houses that had stables at the back. The Candletons were, or so it seemed to me, above our station. There was at one time a story that Mr Candleton was connected with wine. I could well believe this. Like his house, Mr Candleton’s face had toned to a remarkably pleasant shade of inflammable rose. This always seemed perhaps brighter than it really was because his eyes were so blue. They were of that rare shade of pale violet blue that always seems about to dissolve, especially in intoxication. This effect was still further heightened by hair of a most pure distinguished shade of yellow: a thick oat-straw yellow that was quite startling and remarkable in a male.
All the Candleton sisters too had their father’s pale violet dissolving eyes and that exceptional shade of oat-straw hair.
At first, when they were very small children, it was white and silky. Then as they grew up its characteristic shining straw-colour grew stronger. A stranger seeing them for the first time would have said that they were seven dolls who had been dipped in a solution of something several shades paler than saffron. The hair was very beautiful when brushed and as children they all wore it long.
On hot days in summer Mr Candleton wore cream flannel trousers with a blue pin stripe in them, a blazer with red and orange stripes, and a straw hat with a band of the same design. Round his waist he wore a red silk cummerbund. All his shirts were of silk and he always wore them buttoned at the neck. In winter he wore things like Donegal tweeds: roughish, sporting, oatmeal affairs that were just right for his grained waterproof shooting brogues. He wore smart yellow gloves and a soft tweed hat with a little feather in the band. He always seemed to be setting off somewhere, brisk and dandyish and correct, a man of leisure with plenty of time to spare.
It was quite different with Mrs Candleton. The house was big and rambling and it might well have been built specially to accommodate Mrs Candleton, who was like a big, absent-minded, untidy, roving bear. My mother used to say that she got up and went to bed in a pinafore. It wasn’t a very clean pinafore either. Nor were her paper hair-curlers, which were sometimes still in her rough unruly black hair at tea-time. She always seemed to be wearing carpet-slippers and sometimes her stockings would be slipping down. She was a woman who always seemed to be catching up with life and was always a day and a half behind.
The fact was, I suppose, that with seven children in something like a dozen years Mrs Candleton was still naturally hazy in some of her diurnal calculations. Instead of her catching up with life, life was always catching up with her.
Meals, for example, made the oddest appearances in the Candleton household. If I went on a school-less day to call on Stella—she was the one exactly of my own age, the one I knew best—it was either to find breakfast being taken at eleven-thirty, with Mr Candleton always immaculate behind the silver toast-rack and Mrs Candleton looking like the jaded mistress of a rag-and-bone man, or dinner at half-past three or tea at seven. In a town like Evensford everybody was rigidly governed by factory hours and the sound of factory hooters. At various times of the day silences fell on the town that were a hushed indication that all honest people were decently at work. All this meant that breakfast was at seven, dinner at twelve-thirty and tea at half-past five. That was how everybody ate and lived and ran their lives in Evensford: everybody, that is, except the Candletons.
These characteristics of excessive and immediate smartness on the one hand and the hair-curler and pinafore style on the other had been bequeathed by her and Mrs Candleton in almost exactly equal measure to their children. The girls were all beautiful, all excessively dressy as they grew up and, as my mother was fond of saying, not over clean.
‘If they get a cat-lick once a week it’s about as much as they do get,’ was one of her favourite sayings.
But children do not notice such things very acutely and I cannot say that I myself was very interested in the virtues of soap and water. What I liked about the Candletons was not only a certain mysterious quality of what I thought was aristocracy but a feeling of untamed irresponsibility. They were effervescent. When the eldest girl, Lorna, was seventeen she ran off with a Captain in the Royal Artillery who turned out to be a married man. I thought it might well have been the sort of thing that would have ruined a girl, temporarily at least, in Evensford, but Stella simply thought it a wild joke and said:
‘She had a wonderful time. It was gorgeous. They stayed at a marvellous hotel in London. She told us all about it. I thought Mother would die laughing.’
Of laughing, not shame: that was typical of the Candleton standard, the Candleton approach and the Candleton judgement on such things.
The four eldest girls, two of them twins, were called Lorna, Hilda, Rosa and Freda. This habit of giving names ending in the same letter went on to Stella, with whom I played street-games in winter in front of the gas-lit windows of a pork-pie and sausage shop and games in summer in the Candleton garden and among the muscle-developers and bedsteads of the Candleton loft, and then on to the two youngest, who were mere babies as I knew them, Wanda and Eva. Mrs Candleton’s Christian name was Blanche, which suited her perfectly.
It was a common tendency in all the Candleton girls to develop swiftly. At thirteen they were filling out; at fifteen they were splendidly and handsomely buxom and were doing up their hair. Hilda appeared to me to be a goddess of marbled form long before she was eighteen and got engaged to a beefy young farmer who bred prize cattle and called for her in a long open sports car.
Hilda had another characteristic not shared by any of the rest of the family except her mother. She sang rather well. At eighteen she began to have her pleasant, throaty, contralto voice trained. Mr Candleton was a strict Sunday morning churchgoer in pin-stripe trousers, bowler hat and spats, and Hilda went with him to sing in the choir. Her voice was trained by a Mr Lancaster, a rather bumptious pint-size tenor who gave her lessons three evenings a week. It was generally known that Mr Lancaster was, as a singer at any rate, past his best, but it was not long before the engagement between Hilda and the farmer was broken.
At that time Stella and I were nine. I, at least, was nine and Stella, physically, was twelve or thirteen. What I liked about her so much in those days was her utter freedom to come and go as she pleased. Other children had errands to run, confirmation classes to attend, catechisms to learn, aunts to visit, restrictive penances like shoes to clean or knives to rub up with bath-brick.
In the Candleton way she had never anything to do but play, enjoy herself, indulge in inconsequential make-believe and teach me remarkable things about life and living.
‘What shall we do? Let’s be married. Let’s go up to the loft and be married.’
‘We were married the day before yesterday.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You can be married over and over again. Hilda’s going to be. Come on, let’s be married.’
‘All right. But not in the loft. Let’s have a new house this time.’
‘All right. Let’s be married in the wych-elm.’
The Candleton garden extended beyond the stables into a rough orchard of old damson trees, with a few crooked espalier pears. A pepper-pot summer house in rustic work with a thatched roof stood in one corner, almost obliterated by lilac trees. In summer damsons and pears fell into the deep grass and no one picked them up. A sense of honeyed rotting quietness spread under the lurching trees and was compressed and shut in by a high boundary line of old, tapering wych-elms.
Rooks nested in the highest of the elms and when summer thickened the branches the trees were like a wall. The house was hidden and shut away. On a heavy summer day you would hear nothing there but the sound of rooks musing and croaking and fruit falling with a squashy mellow plop on the grass and paths.
Up in the wych-elms the peculiar structure of boughs made a house for us. We could walk about it. We crawled, like monkeys, from tree to tree. In this paradise we stayed for entire afternoons, cocooned with scents, hidden away in leaves. We made tea in ancient saucepans on flameless fires of elm twigs and prepared dinners of potatoes and gravy from fallen pears. And up here, on a soft August afternoon, we were married without witnesses and Stella, with her yellow hair done up for the first time, wore a veil of lace curtains and carried a bunch of cow-parsley.
But before that happened I had caught only the day before, another glimpse of the Candleton way of living.
I had called about six o’clock in the evening for Stella but although the door of the house was open nobody, for some time at any rate, answered my ring at the bell. That was not at all unusual at the Candleton household. Although it never seemed possible for nine such unmistakable people to disappear without trace it was frequently happening and often I went to the door and rang until I was tired of ringing and then went away without an answer.
I remember once ringing the bell and then, tired of it, peeping into the kitchen. It was one of those big old-fashioned kitchens with an enormous iron cooking range with plate racks above it and gigantic dressers and vast fish-kettles and knife-cleaners everywhere. In the middle of it all Mrs Candleton sat asleep. Not normally asleep, I could see. A quarter-full bottle of something for which I had no definition stood on the table in front of her, together with a glass and, beside the glass, most astonishing thing of all, her false teeth.
Blowsily, frowsily, comfortably, toothlessly, Mrs Candleton was sleeping away the afternoon in her hair-curlers and her pinafore.
But on the evening I called for Stella the kitchen was empty. I rang the bell four or five times and then, getting no answer, stepped into the hall.
‘Hullo,’ someone said.
That very soft, whispered throaty voice was Hilda’s. She was standing at the top of the stairs. She was wearing nothing but her petticoat and her feet were bare. In her hands she was holding a pair of stockings, which she had evidently been turning inside out in readiness to put on.
‘Oh! it’s you,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard someone.’
‘Is Stella here?’
‘They’re all out. They’ve all gone to the Robinsons’ for tea. It’s Katie’s birthday.’
‘Oh! I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I’ll come again tomorrow——’
‘I’m just going to a dance,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see my dress? Would you?—come on, come up.’
Standing in the bedroom, with the August sunlight shining on her bare shoulders, through the lace of her slip and on her sensational yellow Candleton hair, she was a magnificent figure of a girl.
‘Just let me put my stockings on and then you can see my dress.’
She sat down on the bed to put on her stockings. Her legs were smooth and heavy. I experienced an odd sensation as the stockings unrolled up her legs and then were fastened somewhere underneath the petticoat. Then she stood up and looked at the back of her legs to see if her stockings were straight. After that she smoothed the straps of her petticoat over her shoulders and said:
‘Just wait till I give my hair one more brush.’
I shall never forget how she sat before the dressing mirror and brushed her hair. I was agreeably and mystically stunned. The strokes of the brush made her hair shine exactly, as I have said before, like oat-straw. Nothing could have been purer and more shining. It was marvellously burnished and she laughed at me in the mirror because I stood there so staring and speechless and stunned.
‘Well, do I look nice? You think I shall pass in a crowd?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good. It’s nice to have a man’s opinion.’
She laughed again and put on her dress. It was pure white, long and flouncy. I remember distinctly the square low collar. Then she put on her necklace. It was a single row of pearls and she couldn’t fasten it.
‘Here, you can do this,’ she said.
She sat on the bed and I fastened the necklace. The young hair at the nape of her neck was like yellow chicken down. I was too confused to notice whether she had washed her neck or not and then she said:
‘That’s it. Now just a little of this and I’m ready.’
She sprayed her hair, her arms and the central shadow of her bosom with scent from a spray.
‘How about a little for you?’
She sprayed my hair and in a final moment of insupportable intoxication I was lost in a wave of wallflowers.
‘That’s the most expensive scent there is,’ she said. ‘The most difficult to make. Wallflowers.’
Perhaps it was only natural, next day, as I came to be married to Stella high at the altar of the wych-elms, that I found myself oppressed by a sensation of anticlimax. Something about Stella, I felt, had not quite ripened. I had not the remotest idea as to what it could be except that she seemed, in some unelevating and puzzling way, awkward and flat.
‘What do you keep staring at me for?’
‘I’m just going to spray you with scent,’ I said. ‘There—piff! pish! pfiff——’
‘Whatever made you think of that?’
I was afraid to speak of Hilda and I said:
‘All girls have to have scent on when they’re married.’
‘Do I look nice?’
She didn’t really look nice. The lace curtain was mouldy in one corner and had holes down one side. I didn’t like the odour of cow-parsley. But the soft golden oat-straw hair was as remarkable as ever and I said:
‘You look all right.’
Then we were married. After we were married she said:
‘Now you have to make love to me.’
‘Everybody has to make love when they’re married.’
I looked at her in utter mystification. Then suddenly she dropped the cow-parsley and pushed back her veil and kissed me. She held me in an obliterating and momentary bondage by the trunk of the wych-elm, kissing me with such blistering force that I lost my cap. I was rather upset about my cap as it fell in the nettles below but she said:
‘Sit down. We’re in bed now. We have to be in bed now we’re married. It’s the first thing people do.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you know?’
I did not know; nor, as it happens, did she. But one of the advantages of being born one of a family of seven sisters is that you arrive much earlier at the approximation of the more delicate truths than you do if you are a boy. Perhaps in this respect I was a backward boy, but I could only think it was rather comfortless trying to make love in a wych-elm and after a time I said:
‘Let’s go and play in the loft now.’
‘What with?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a change. We’ve been married an awful lot of times——’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘We’ll play with the chest-developers.’
While we played in the loft with the chest-developers she had an original thought.
‘I think if I practise a lot with these I shall get fat up top more quickly.’
‘You will?’
‘I think I shall soon anyway.’
Like Hilda, I thought. A renewed sensation of agreeable and stupefying delight, together with a scent of wallflowers, shot deliciously through me and I was half-way to the realization of the truth that girls are pleasant things when she said:
‘One day, when we’re big, let’s be really married, shall us?’
‘All right.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You know what you’ll be when you’re married to me, don’t you?’ she said.
I couldn’t think.
‘You’ll be a viscount,’ she said.
‘What’s a viscount?’
‘It’s the husband of a viscountess.’
‘How shall I come to be that?’
‘Because a viscountess is the daughter of a lord.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘your father isn’t a lord.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but his brother is. He lives in a castle in Bedfordshire. It has a hundred and forty rooms in it. We go there every summer. And when he dies my father will be a lord.’
‘Is he going to die?’
‘Soon.’
‘Supposing your father dies before he does?’
‘Oh! he won’t,’ she said. ‘He’s the youngest son. The oldest always die first.’
She went on to tell me many other interesting things about our life together. Everything in that life would be of silk, she said, like her father’s shirts. Silk sheets on the bed, silk pillows, silk tablecloths, silk cushions. ‘And I shall always wear silk drawers,’ she said. ‘Even on week-days.’
Altogether, it seemed, we should have a marvellous life together.
‘And we shall drink port wine for supper,’ she said. ‘Like my father does. He always drinks port wine for supper.’
‘Is it nice?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m allowed to have it sometimes. You’ll like it. You can get drunk as often as you like then. Like my father does.’
‘Does he get drunk?’
‘Not as often as my mother does,’ she said, ‘but quite a lot.’
I suppose I was shocked.
‘Oh! that’s all right,’ she said. ‘Lords always get drunk. That’s why people always say “drunk as a lord.” That’s the proper thing to do.’
Armed with the chest-developers, we spent an ecstatic afternoon. I was so filled with the golden snobbery of being a viscount that it was a cold and dusty sort of shock when she told me that anyway we couldn’t be married for years and years, not until she was fatter, like Hilda was.
The recollection of Hilda, all burnished and magnificent and intoxicating and perfumed, inflamed and inspired me to greater efforts with the chest-developers.
‘We must work harder,’ I said.
I wanted so much to be a lord, to live in a castle, to drink port wine and to be married to someone with silk drawers that I was totally unprepared for the shock my mother gave me.
‘The little fibber, the little story-teller, the little liar,’ she said.
‘But she said so,’ I said. ‘She told me.’
‘I went to board school with Reggie Candleton,’ she said. ‘He was in my class. They came from Gas Street.’
Nothing in the world was worse than coming from Gas Street. You could not go lower than Gas Street. The end of the respectable world was Gas Street.
‘It’s she who had the money,’ my mother said. ‘Mrs Candleton. Her father was a brewer and Reggie Candleton worked there. He was always such a little dandy. Such a little masher. Always the one for cutting such a dash.’
I decided it was wiser to say nothing about the prospect of marrying, or about Stella’s urgent efforts with the chest-developers, or the silk drawers.
‘All top show,’ my mother said. ‘That’s what it is. All fancy fol-di-dols on top and everything dropping into rags underneath. Every one of them with hair like a ten-guinea doll and a neck you could sow carrots in.’
I don’t suppose for a moment that Stella remembers me; or that, on an uncomfortable, intimate occasion, we were married in a wych-elm. It is equally unlikely that Hilda remembers me; or that, with her incomparable yellow hair, her white dance dress, her soft blonde flesh and her rare scent of wallflowers, she once asked me to give her my opinion as a man. I believe Stella is married to a bus-conductor. The rest of the Candletons have faded from my life. With the summer frocks, the summer straw-hats and the summer flannels, the cummerbunds, the silk shirts, the elegant brogues, the chest-developers and the incomparable yellow hair they have joined Mr Candleton in misty, muted, permanent bankruptcy.
Love in a wych-elm is not an easy thing; but like the Candletons it is unforgettable.